What kind of book is this? It starts as a catalog of sorts. The Librarian of Congress, James Billington, in his preface, describes the depth and extent of the Library's Freud collection, while the editor, Michael Roth, in his introduction, guides us through the exhibition Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture. We are led to believe that the various essays in the volume serve as extended comments on the themes of the exhibition. But, in fact, the links are hard to discern. The book soon loses all semblance of connection or cohesion.

To some degree the book resembles the proceedings of a conference designed to explore the place of a significant figure in the history of psychoanalysis, such as recent conferences on Ferenczi or